Time Emotional Analysis of Arabic Tweets at Multiple Levels

Sentiment and emotional analyses have recently become effective tools to discover peoples attitudes towards reallife events. While Many corners of the emotional analysis research have been conducted, time emotional analysis at expression and aspect levels is yet to be intensively explored. This paper aims to analyse people emotions from tweets extracted during the Arab Spring and the recent Egyptian Revolution. Analysis is done on tweet, expression and aspect levels. In this research, we only consider surprise, happiness, sadness, and anger emotions in addition to sarcasm expression. We propose a time emotional analysis framework that consists of four components namely annotating tweets, classifying at tweet/expression levels, clustering on some aspects, and analysing the distributions of people emotions,expressions, and aspects over specific time. Our contribution is two-fold. First, our framework effectively analyzes people emotional trends over time, at different fine-granularity levels (tweets, expressions, and aspects) while being easily adaptable to other languages. Second, we developed a lightweight clustering algorithm that utilizes the short length of tweets. On this problem, the developed clustering algorithm achieved higher results compared to state-of-the-art clustering algorithms. Our approach achieved 70.1% F-measure in classification, compared to 85.4% which is the state of the art results on English. Our approach also achieved 61.45% purity in clustering. Keywords—Emotional Analysis; Sentiment Analysis; Clustering; Two-Step Classification; Time Analysis